OK, I know it’s boring because I do it every year but it’s not my fault it gets worse every year and I can’t adapt.

Who wants to guess when our neighborhood Halloween party was?

Today.

I keep staring at the calendar like a maniac. I mean, it’s not even the weekend before Halloween. It’s the weekend before the weekend before Halloween. Klara is old enough to understand that something is not right. “But it’s not Halloween yet, Mommy,” she says. “Why are we having a party?” I have no idea what to respond.

On the positive side, kids were given glow sticks at the party, and these were Klara’s first glow sticks, so she’s enraptured.

She’s also a very polite child. “Look, a witch!” a said pointing to one of the decorations.

“It might actually be a skeleton, Mommy,” she said gently. “I think you made a mistake. But that’s OK! Don’t be sad!”

Incredibly, I just heard a smart idea on immigration on Fox News. Somebody said that processing centers for asylum claims should be set up everywhere in Central America so that people don’t have to trudge in horrible conditions across several borders only to be turned back in the end.

I’m completely in favor of setting up such centers to make the process less disruptive, humiliating, and dangerous for the migrants. But it won’t happen because then the migrants can’t be used to rile up voters here in the US.

The founder of the Little Free Library died. It’s so sad. And he was quite young, too.

We have three little free libraries in the close vicinity, and we use them all the time to take and leave books.

I remember how recently the little free libraries were bashed by the progressive crowd for perpetuating oppression and privilege. It’s as if these folks were trying to get everybody to hate them because it’s very hard not to hate people who oppose a free, neighborly exchange of books.

Nothing compares with the excitement of folks who spent most of their lives in the USSR when they encounter Alexa for the first time. It immediately makes the purchase totally worth it right there.

There are many things to hate about smartphones but there’s one thing they definitely changed for the better. Smartphones killed boredom. Nobody will ever be bored again.

Of course, boredom is the mother of genius but that’s nitpicking.